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Stop developing this technology

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Re: Stop developing this technology

#301

Post by tgv »

tlongo wrote: post #167
tgv wrote: post #75

Remember: if you helped develop it, you're responsible for it. If it kills people, you share the blame. So, what's the possible scenario for that outcome? Well, look at the upcoming elections in Nigeria. The BBC writes: "With an estimated 80 million Nigerians online, social media plays a huge role in national debates about politics. Our investigation uncovered different tactics used to reach more people on Twitter. M…

I think "blame" is the wrong term here. No one can be blamed for unintended consequences (most of the time, I guess). However, the fact remains that one is a crucial part of the chain of events that led to the very existence of the consequence.

Knowingly. It's not as if no-one warned, and as if there aren't any precedents.

But you wouldn't blame the man who puts a poison pill near a playground, and claims "I didn't make them eat it"?

Re: Stop developing this technology

#302

Post by JohnFen »

Levitz wrote: post #237
entropi wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don't agree with this. Assume that the following premises are true: * action x is legal, but results in a worse world for everyone. * doing action x benefits the first 1000 people who do it. * much more than 1000 are capable of doing x, including me. * if I do it now, I will be one of the first 1000. If these are true, I think one should do action x. I believe one would be completely justified in doing it.

Not only that, but if some people have ethical and moral considerations about the consequences of x, then those people have an ethical reason to actually do the thing, since the alternative is that the people doing it are those with no ethical or moral consideration. If a piece of technology is going to be 90% bad 10% good and you can push it to 80% bad then it is completely justifiable to go for it.

I could not disagree more.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#303

Post by JohnFen »

jolmg wrote: post #222
KyeRussell wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should also be said that anyone that makes this argument immediately loses their right to complain when governments need to step in and regulate.

You're commenting even after someone has already provided a legitimate good use of this tech, and are the third person to write as if it were established that it's unethical to develop this tech. I never said that it's fine to do unethical things because others will do it anyway, and I wish you wouldn't imply that I did. From the get-go, it was an open discussion whether the development was good/bad/neutral, and my o…

> My position is that development is not unethical.

I think this is where we disagree at heart. I don't think that development is an ethically neutral act, any more than any other human activity is ethically neutral.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#304

Post by JohnFen »

jolmg wrote: post #15
jakelazaroff wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we agree that “someone would have done this anyway” is a poor justification for one’s actions? That’s what you say when you 1) recognize that you did a bad thing, but 2) don’t want to be blamed for it.

Can we agree that it's fundamentally not a bad thing to develop a technology? If you were a legislator, how would you like to criminalize the development of technology? You know, the most difficult part of this tech is probably the facial tracking, which is probably also used for the animation of 3d avatars. The jump is probably not huge.

> Can we agree that it's fundamentally not a bad thing to develop a technology?

I do not agree with this assertion.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#305

Post by JohnFen »

candiodari wrote: post #62
pfortuny wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Tell that to Einstein, who just before Hiroshima realized it was not such a good argument. That is a nice piece of history. Ethics is important. And one consequence is: I may die but at least it was not because I made it possible.

While Einstein regretted working on nuclear weapons, the work they did there is equally responsible for the many lives saved by nuclear power, which he also appreciated. Also, it was the first 20% of the work towards nuclear fusion. Technology is not evil or good. Even this technology could be great. Jacky Chan, for example, is not going to make any more movies. But I want more of those movies. This very technology w…

> Technology is not evil or good.

But a given technology may be much more suited to doing evil than doing good.

> Jacky Chan, for example, is not going to make any more movies. But I want more of those movies. This very technology would allow that.

Which is something that I would consider ethically wrong unless Jackie Chan consented to it.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#306

Post by UncleEntity »

lonelyasacloud wrote: post #269
UncleEntity wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With that said almost every use-case cited was financial or monetary gain whereas I enquired about social utility and value. It could allow people to petition their government [0] without having someone bust down their door at 3am and disappear forever. [0] Which is apparently important enough to have been included in the bill of rights

> It could allow people to petition their government [0] without having someone bust down their door at 3am and disappear forever. Surely just wearing a mask - virtual or otherwise - does the job without the deep fakery?

No doubt, but they wanted a non-capitalistic reason why this technology isn’t The Debil.

And having subtle clues from watching a person’s face while they’re proposing whatever action to overthrow the patriarchy is more convincing than some random person wearing a Guy Fawkes mask talking about revolution for the umpteenth time.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#307

Post by Veen »

LeanderK wrote: post #238

Again and again I am astonished that people without ethics exist, that they are confident in what they are doing and that they appear to be completely unable to reflect upon their actions. They just don't care and appear to be proud of it. If this is used to scam old people out of their belongings then you really have to question your actions and imho bear some responsibility. Was it worth it? Do the positive uses ou…

What's as worrying, judging by the comments here and in that GitHub thread, is that there is no correlation between technical ability and ethical understanding. Perhaps naively, I'd have thought someone intelligent enough to develop a technology like this would also be intelligent enough to understand the complex ethical issues it raises. It seems, unfortunately, that there is no such correlation.

In fact, anecdotally, it seems the people with the technical ability are least likely to have a nuanced understanding of the ethical impact of their work (or, more optimistically, it's only people with the conjunction of technical ability and ethical idiocy who would work on this, and we're not seeing all the capable people who choose not to).

Also, what's with all the people in this thread coming up with implausible edge cases in which deep fake tech could be used ethically to justify a technology that will very obviously be used unethically in the vast majority of cases? It's almost useless for anything except deception—it is intrinsically deceptive. All the 'yeah but cars kill people so should we ban all cars?' comments miss the obvious point that cars are extremely useful, so we accept the relatively small negatives. The ethical balance is the other way around for deep fake tech. It's almost entirely harmful, with some small use cases that might arguably be valuable to someone.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#308

Post by prox »

JohnFen wrote: post #294
lovemenot wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are others - not you - who will justify their own actions thusly: the technology existed, its better that the good guys (me - of course) should use it before the bad guys do. In the space between both equivocations (yours and the other guy's), lies the potential for moral abuse.

That's an even more faulty argument, though, because almost everyone considers themselves one of "the good guys".

Indeed, I think terming yourself in good vs bad as an we vs them terminology makes several biases go undiscovered that if you truly go for objectivity despite your sense of moral leaning is telling you.

Re: Stop developing this technology

#309

Post by jolmg »

JohnFen wrote: post #303
jolmg wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're commenting even after someone has already provided a legitimate good use of this tech, and are the third person to write as if it were established that it's unethical to develop this tech. I never said that it's fine to do unethical things because others will do it anyway, and I wish you wouldn't imply that I did. From the get-go, it was an open discussion whether the development was good/bad/neutral, and my o…

> My position is that development is not unethical. I think this is where we disagree at heart. I don't think that development is an ethically neutral act, any more than any other human activity is ethically neutral.

I see this as part of the expansion of knowledge. People conduct research to get a better understanding of the universe. Tech development is about our understanding of what we can do and how. People conducting studies and research can be unethical in the process, same as tech development, but I can't think of knowledge that would be unethical to expand in if the process is ethical. What understanding of the universe would be wrong to obtain if ethical means were available?

If there's none, why is expanding our knowledge of what we can do and how any different?

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